Five suggestions while explaining #Bitcoin to friends & family this Thanksgiving.🦃👇

1️⃣Chill out. Most people are turned off by overconfidence and hyper-verbal explanations.

2️⃣Stay humble. People been saying stuff like, “I told these idiots to buy last year at 16k.” Ok…yeah…but you were likely barking just as loud the year before at 59k. They are still skeptical; rightfully so.

3️⃣Start small & slow. Give them ONE digestible resource they might actually have a chance of looking at in the future.

4️⃣Consider actually listening. Let others talk. You don’t have everything figured out. #BTC doesn’t solve everything.

5️⃣Stay optimistic & hopeful. The world isn’t “completely f**ked.” That’s not most people’s experience or feeling, and it’s not a tone most respond to.

I am getting close to giving a more detailed assessment on Israel/Hamas, as it drags on.

And it will probably be Nostr-only since other platforms can’t handle it. It is too polarized. Everyone is tunnel-visioned.

My husband is currently in Cairo dealing with some property work we are doing for our extended family. They are only 250 miles from the problem, and Egypt’s acute currency crisis brings it closer to home if military or refugee shit hits the fan. Most of my extended family is geopolitically or financially close to the Israel/Gaza issue and is Muslim. I am thus both close and far from the issue. And I grew up in the US in a diverse region with Jewish and Muslim peers, but more-so Jewish overall.

Suffice to say, I don’t want civilians on either side to suffer or die. I am pro-humanity first and foremost.

Before I give my eventual analysis, I am happy to see Nostr comments on the issue. What are your thoughts and questions on the topic? What would you like to see addressed from a diverse or as non-biased source as possible?

Bitcoin Gladiator?!

Late night deep thoughts on Nostr:

One of the most challenging parts of being a firefighter/paramedic is also one of the coolest parts.

Like many other healthcare providers, we see fucked up shit quite often. We witness illness, sickness , suffering & death on a regular basis. To most, this seems like a negative (and it certainly has its challenges), but it's also a huge gift. It injects incredible perspective on the REALITY of life. We get a chance to process the true fragility of the human condition earlier than many others.

Therefore, it often feels like a gift to be able to sit back and recognize just how much of a blessing health & youth are. Firemen make this realization in their 20s & 30s, many others make this realization in their 50s & 60s.

A guy sends me a polite email, and says in a couple paragraphs that 1) he doesn't really see any role for bitcoin in a portfolio, it has no intrinsic value, and it just trades on sentiment and also that 2) it threatens USD hegemony and so politicians are likely going to add friction to it.

So I'm like, well, if there's nothing particularly valuable about it to give it any value or consideration for a portfolio, why does it threaten USD hegemony? Like, it threatens the largest and most globally salable monetary network in the world while having no intrinsic value, no portfolio role, while just being a thing that trades on sentiment?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've never been a big fan of social media, but I just got on Nostr. I wish I would have gotten around to it sooner. So far, it feels like early Internet before it was ruined. I wonder what it will be like in the future if it gets more popular.

Although it was predictable ahead of time that so many Palestinian civilians including children would die as a result of Israel’s response to the attack on Israel by Hamas, as the numbers continue to add up it is increasingly hard to watch.

Half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. There is not much more sad in this world than children, cut off from electricity and communication, violently dying from air strikes in darkness.

And sadly this happens in other places of the world too.

For much of human history, people were only aware of their own local area. Now we have awareness of large swaths of the world, and so we can keep track of tragedies in real time. We then desensitize ourselves out of necessity. Like, the sheer amount of negative information and unsolvable problems hit us through media, and in order to productively do something to add value to someone else, there is little choice other than compartmentalization it. An electrician can’t be caught up in the troubles of the world as he goes out each day and fixes things and building things, for example. In order to add order to his small part of the world, he can’t be fully caught up with its global chaos.

And then, I see these crazy protestors tearing down flyers about kidnapped Israelis, as though that activity could possibly be the best use of their time. People have a strong tendency to want to be part of something bigger and longer lasting than themselves, whether it is their religion, their community, their ideology, or their work. But some people chose such fruitless ways of doing it. Yes, you can and should advocate for not bombing children. No, you shouldn’t try to erase what happened to murdered or captured Israelis either. It is not rocket science.

The world is an increasingly polarized place, and my biggest concern is for those polarizations to be used to take rights away in a more broader context, or to wage war between larger opponents. Politicians will propagandize any small share of “crypto funding” to bad groups to justify more restrictions on those technologies and privacy in general. As countries go through sovereign debt crises, having some sort of enemy to point to helps their narrative for capital controls and keeping their citizens in currency and bonds as they are inflated away. I’ve studied the 1940s financial environment too much to be unaware of this.

Always look through to the bigger story, and ideally with a perspective of empathy toward many sides of any complex issue. Strive to be able to articulate your opponent’s view as well as they can, so that your counter argument can be most effective and surgical in its nature. And then, when there is nothing you can do about something globally, try instead to bring order and reason and improvement and kindness to whatever small portion of the world that you can.